One of the more fatuous beliefs that has been foisted off by self-proclaimed feminists and other politically correct lamebrains is that children don’t really need fathers.  I used to say that American women, thanks to increased salaries and well-stocked sperm banks, had reached a point where they only needed men to open ketchup bottles and get stuff down from high shelves.  Ladies, I was joking!

I had no idea that so many women took the line to heart.  Thanks to my good joke and Gloria Steinem’s bad one -- that crack about fish needing bicycles -- women have become increasingly wacky.  What is really surprising, considering that thirty years of feminist propaganda has promoted the natural superiority of females, is how masculine, in the worst sense of the word, women have become.

Surely I am not the only person who has noticed that these days young women are just as likely as men to smoke, to get bombed on booze and cuss in public, and perhaps even likelier to drive like maniacs and to flip you off for daring to share the road with them.

In the business world, far too many women salivate at the thought of being regarded as cold and ruthless.  They are every bit as likely to torment and humiliate their employees, and to promote an atmosphere of fear and anger, especially among their female underlings.  Call these women cut-throat and they think you’re trying to sweet talk them.

Perhaps it’s simply a case of Stockholm syndrome gone amuck.  As you probably know, that’s a situation in which hostages come to identify, not with their rescuers, but with their captors.  Women, in their own defense, might possibly claim that they’d been powerless for so long that it was inevitable that they’d take on the very characteristics they’ve despised.  But that’s a load of hooey.  I say, if you’re going to behave like an idiot and a bully, don’t make excuses for your boorishness.  God knows men don’t!

Inasmuch as more and more women are eager to hand off their offspring to a nanny, a granny or a nursery school, you have to wonder why most of them even bother giving birth.  All they seem to have to show for the experience are stretch marks.

In a society that is determined to accept the nutty notion that two gay men or a pair of lesbians are just as likely -- they really mean likelier -- to raise a normal, healthy child as a married man and woman, how could anybody dare suggest that a single woman isn’t equally capable?  Well, she isn’t.  This is especially true when the child is a boy.  No matter how hard she tries, no matter how much she cares, no matter how many broken nails she’s willing to sacrifice in order to play catch with the kid, the bottom line is she’s a woman.  And just because so many of the morons in Hollywood have turned single motherhood into just another fad, sort of like collagen lips and plastic bosoms, doesn’t make it a good idea.

It simply makes sense that a boy needs a man in his life to act as a role model, to show him not only how to curb his temper and to temper his testosterone, but also how to avoid being feminized into something resembling a well-dressed eunuch.

The point I am looking to make I saw made perfectly in a segment of a TV magazine show some years ago.  It seems that in Africa, on a game preserve, the rangers were discovering the mutilated carcasses of several rhinos.  They couldn’t determine who was responsible for the carnage, and they couldn’t imagine a motive.

After conducting an investigation, they found to their amazement that a band of teenage elephants was killing the rhinos for no other reason than that they felt like it.  It was their version of drive-by shootings.  Like our own urban gangs, the young rogues even had a leader.

The rangers thought long and hard about the problem.  The first thing they realized was that the teenagers were free to make up their own evil rules of behavior because, like the blood-thirsty kids in Lord of the Flies, there were no adults in their world.  All the bull elephants had been slaughtered by poachers for their ivory.

Then, because they didn’t have to answer to politicians or social workers, the rangers did two essential things.  First, having determined he was incorrigible, they killed the leader of the pack.  Next, they flew in several bull elephants.  In no time at all, order was restored.  The big guys let it be known that if there was any more rhino-stomping, there would be hell to pay.  Their message was short and sweet; namely that elephants don’t behave that way.

So, for all their professional advances, there are still a few things that women simply can’t do as well as men.  Some of those things, such as throwing a football forty yards in a perfect spiral or crushing a beer can on their forehead, aren’t all that essential.  Important, I’ll grant you, but not absolutely essential to society at large.

However, when it comes to rearing male children, we’d all probably be better off if the ladies simply dropped the kids off in the woods for wolves to raise.

Burt Prelutsky has written for Dragnet, McMillan & Wife, MASH, Mary Tyler Moore, Rhoda, Bob Newhart, Family Ties, Dr. Quinn, and Diagnosis Murder.  He wrote a humor column for the Los Angeles Times and was the movie critic for Los Angeles magazine.  His most recent book is Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco (A Hollywood Rightwinger Comes Out of the Closet).

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